Patients leading healthcare revolution

A report from Research and Markets predicted in August 2013 that the global telemedicine market will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 18.9 percent from 2012 to 2016, primarily due to an increase in remote patient telemonitoring and strategic partnerships among vendors.

Telemedicine in itself has witnessed a major branching out. Today evolved forms of this industry include services like teleophthalmology, teleradiology, telecardiology, teleneurology, teledermatology, telepsychiatry and telepathology amongst others.

According to a recent Healthcare Access Study conducted by IMS Health, 70 percent of the health care infrastructure in India (doctors, beds, nurses, etc) is concentrated in urban areas where 30 percent of the population lives. Nearly 31 percent of the rural population has to travel over 30 km to access medical treatment.

Various state governments of Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Kerala and others in the Indian subcontinent have implemented telemedicine programs to improve health care services for the rural population. The ministry of health and family welfare, too, has launched the integrated disease surveillance program network with help of the Indian Space Research Organization.India has 1.6 million beds for a population of 1.2 billion. This translates to 1.3 beds per 1000 people. China is closest to India with 2.8 per 1000, the US average is 3.6, while the global average is 4.8 per 1000 and countries such as Japan are sitting at 6 beds per 1000 population.

Never too crowded at CLOUDIt has been said that this year we may collect more data about the human body than in all the history of medicine so far. SINTEF claimed that 90 percent of the world's data has been generated in just the last two years.Today, across various countries, automatically transmitted or patient-supplied data is helping in reducing the cost of collecting data. The added advantage is that all the data can be monitored more regularly.